1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image transmitting apparatus for transmitting image data similar to a facsimile apparatus by use of an e-mail system, and relates to an image receiving apparatus for receiving the transmitted image data. The present invention relates particularly to the Internet facsimile apparatus wherein an image file is attached to an e-mail and transmission and reception are carried out on the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet facsimile apparatus (hereinafter referred to as IFAX) is conventionally known as a new facsimile image communication apparatus. IFAX converts image data of an original to a file of a TIFF format, attaches the image file to a mail main body as a form of an attached file, and transmits such an image file to an e-mail address for a recipient by use of the e-mail.
By the way, for directly transmitting a large amount of data such as a color image to a recipient's apparatus by the above IFAX, a large amount of memories is required in the recipient's apparatus. For this reason, in many cases, there are difficulties in transmitting the color image by use of the e-mail in actuality.
In order to deal with such difficulties, a new image communication system has been proposed. In this system, the e-mail having image data attached is not directly transmitted to the mail address of the recipient's apparatus. Instead of such a direct transmission, image data is registered to a WWW server placed on the network and a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for accessing to the WWW server is transmitted to the recipient's apparatus. The above system can prevent an unexpected large amount of data from being directly sent to a mail box of a recipient's terminal.
However, in view of the usability, the registration of transmission data to the WWW server from IFAX and the transmission of URL to the recipient's terminal are not still good enough in the case of transmitting a large amount of data such as a color image.
In other words, even if image data is placed at the WWW server, the large amount of data must be fetched at one time when the recipient's apparatus fetches data. For this reason, the large amount of memories is required in the recipient's apparatus. Also, in the case of color printing the color image received from the WWW server, the entire received original is printed. For this reason, a lot of printing time is required, and its cost is increased. Moreover, even when an operator wishes to transmit and print an image with a higher quality than an image quality determined in a standard image data format, the image is always limited to a determined quality. Also, in a case where the operator wishes to change the WWW server where transmitting data is registered in accordance with the transmitting destination, such a case cannot be carried out.